‘White Snails’ Locarno Review: Two Lost Souls, One Tentative Connection

The bond that forms between two lonely souls in a big city that seems to ignore them is a familiar thread in many films. In this Belarusian take on that story, the protagonists who share that predicament—and who eventually connect—could hardly be more different. But perhaps it’s precisely that distance that brings them together, offering a faint possibility of escape from the emotional pit they’re stuck in.

Inspired by real experiences, though fictionalized, WHITE SNAILS follows the life of a model named Masha (Marya Imbro), a young woman of unusual beauty who is trying to make a career in China, where there seems to be plenty of work for Eastern European women. Beyond that, however, Masha feels isolated: she struggles to connect with people her age (least of all other models) and has a strained relationship with her parents. In fact, the film opens with her surviving a suicide attempt.

After leaving the hospital, Masha searches for another patient who has died, which leads her to Misha (Mikhail Senkov), who works in the morgue and spends his days dealing with corpses. A tattooed, taciturn figure who also appears solitary, Misha paints at home, drawing inspiration from his grim profession. Slowly, through a series of encounters, Misha and Masha—an almost comical name pairing—begin to form a friendship. At first, their connection doesn’t seem to have a romantic dimension, but eventually the line between friendship and something else becomes blurred.

At its core, the film by the directors of SPACE DOGS focuses on Masha’s struggle to relate to others, shaped both by her personality and the world she inhabits. That inability to connect is one of the reasons behind her suicidal impulses. Misha may not be the cheerful presence to pull her out of depression—if anything, he seems the opposite—but perhaps that is why she opens up to him, sharing things she cannot tell her mother or the eccentric healer her family sends her to.

The title refers literally to the snails Masha uses for skin care—creatures that are almost like her pets—but also serves as a metaphor, at times a rather obvious one, for the protagonists’ relationship. Yet what makes the film especially striking is how it situates these personal stories against the backdrop of Belarus’s social and political climate—a country allied with Russia in the war against Ukraine and ruled by Alexander Lukashenko’s not-so-democratic government. That context reverberates in the background, on the radio, and in the anxieties of the characters.

WHITE SNAIL channels the bitterness, darkness, and occasional suffocating atmosphere of many realist dramas from Eastern Europe. More than anything, it offers a psychological portrait of two people trying to carve out some form of connection in a world that ignores them—or, in Masha’s case, reduces her to a product, which is how she has come to see herself. The directors don’t suggest that all problems can be solved through this encounter. They simply point to the possibility of another kind of human connection. Imperfect, not necessarily romantic, and perhaps not even lasting—but enough to keep alive the hope that someone, somewhere, still cares.